"Masculinity" requires approval from other men

Discourse on the “academy” website has one close parallel with the looksmaxxing community: approval from other men.

Source: CNN

I’ve been in a state of disbelief about CNN’s report that an online “rape academy”, educating users to drug and assault their wives, attracted 62 million users in February.

I started writing about masculinity to stop the spillover this crisis of identity was having on every woman I knew - all of us victims of harassment, abuse and/or assault. I’d believed, deep down, that most assault was a temporary lapse in judgement - one potentially motivated by an entrenched view on their right to women’s bodies - but not one that most men would execute so brazenly.

Then I read a study released this month where 95% of men reported intentional coercion to get a woman to have sex with them who had previously not consented. In the 2,689 men aged 18-34 surveyed, physical pressure and verbal coercion were the most common techniques they’d reported using.

90% of assault happens from someone known to you. 1/3 by an intimate partner.

Most disconcerting, there are currently countless victims of this “rape academy” who don’t know. Being raped while you are asleep feels like an extreme form of gaslighting: you wake up feeling like something happened, a button out of place, feeling cramps. But you don’t know why. You assume the person next to you is safe. You assume that getting into bed sober, in your pyjamas, is safe. You are in your own bed, after all.

It feels like the person that raped you owns another version of you that you can never meet: reduced to a limp body, no agency, no evidence, no self. How are you supposed to view your whole self, your identity as a mom or creative or business owner, when this “other” version is supposed to be part of the same person?

The men who do this to their partners aren’t seeking pleasure. They’re seeking to reduce their partner to a commodity, devoid of consciousness or personality, some with the intention to sell these videos on. I can’t help but see this as a symptom of the “masculinity crisis”, the most violent of last-gasp attempts to reclaim their sense of manhood, defined to them as dominance.

I also work on men’s issues, so let me make this clear: there are so many ways of being a man that doesn’t involve hurting other people.

There are whole Reddit threads calling this “another excuse for men bashing”, that the 62 million stat is “the newest way to demonize men”. I urge nuance: gender identity wars instilled the same hierarchical logic that brought us this heinous website.

Discourse on the “academy” website has one close parallel with the looksmaxxing community: approval from other men. As long as the sphere of sexuality and male attractiveness remain systems of male dominance, over each other as much as over women, we are all beholden to systems that tell us what we can/can’t be.

This logic continues to damage all of us.